A recently released study by Epsilon demonstrates that email is continuing to lead among all other online marketing channels to the point that last year's marketing budgets of many brands had up to 20% allocated to email marketing alone, and this figure is expected to increase by another 10% for 2014. This news comes along with the latest statistics on Return On Investment (ROI) that email marketers benefit from, with the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) reporting a $40 ROI for every $1! In an online universe where almost half of all promotional emails sent in 2013 have resulted in a conversion, can you afford to not be relying on email as the heart of your online marketing campaigns?

3 critical megaoptimization tips

Follow these three critical tips to help you megaoptimize your campaign for smartphones:

Use short and concise subject lines - The subject line shown in a notification title can be pretty short on most devices. Even if the users have a mail client open, the subject space is very brief unless the device is in landscape mode. Limit your subject to about 55 characters or less to make sure your subscribers get the full message instead of trying to guess what that truncated line is all about.

Have a good place for subscribers to visit - Get rid of any Flash landing pages and make sure your website loads and renders fast on mobile phones. Rely on CSS3 and HTML5 to create a modern and fully responsive design. Getting a visitor to bounce off your website is same like not getting a visit at all

Avoid clumping up clickable links – Your subscribers are irritated by being forced to zoom in just to be able to click the correct link or button. Instead of plain text links, include actual buttons in your email message that are at least 44 x 44 pixels in size and also make sure to put more than enough space in between them if you have multiple buttons. This will make opening any link easy, even with fat thumbs.

Social share = 115% CTR increase!

One of the biggest trends in email marketing last year was integrating the share buttons from the brand’s social media presences into the missives. With the ability to share the content with friends and followers easily, the email's CTR has been determined to skyrocket up to a staggering 115%. This technique also opened the doors to another type of extremely lucrative marketing: the viral kind. With Facebook alone boasting over one billion active monthly users, each with an average of about 100 friends it only takes one of those to share your content for it to spread across the globe in a rapidfire manner. Let’s not even mention what can happen when you add other social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ into that mix!

LinkedIn boasts a CTR more than double that of Facebook’s

An astonishing 91% of all social emails during 2013 incorporated a Facebook share button in them, making the use pretty well universal. However, quantity doesn't always translate to quality, as the study’s statistics show that even though Facebook was used more than any other, it was LinkedIn that had the class-leading CTR at a remarkable 9.6%, more than double that of Facebook. This stat shows that including LinkedIn share buttons in your emails when appropriate might just be the next big thing in 2014 for any online marketing that even remotely includes B2B content. Due to the professional nature of LinkedIn, promotional emails which focus on strictly B2C content such as special offers and sales aren't really suited for it and would do better on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

With the amazing ROI which only email marketing can provide you certainly owe it to yourself and your brand to implement each and every possible technique you can in order to megaoptimize your entire campaign. Remember that the DMA’s 40 x ROI is an average so that you can bet that there are email marketers out there regularly achieving 50 x, 60 x, or even more. You can be one of them!